At the last Technology Evening, Malcolm Heathfield of Adroit Technologies gave a well received presentation on the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is a scenario in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Malcolm walked us through some scenarios of machine-machine interaction and the underlying enabling technologies.
Machine-to-machine (M2M) describes any technology that enables networked devices to exchange information and perform actions without the manual assistance of humans. Malcolm covered topics such as short range technologies, cloud computing, types of clouds, services choices, predicted Internet growth, M2M growth and enablers, challenges for cellular networks, M2M revenue opportunities, changing client expectations, challenges with BI for industry, partially cloud-based systems, entirely cloud-based systems, data transmission and scada hosting in the cloud.
The branch thank’s Malcolm for his valued and informative talk.
Site visit
During March, members were treated to a 2,5 km walking tour of BMW’s Rosslyn plant by knowledgeable 80 odd year old Jo Klut, who has been working at the plant for 18 years. Also joining us on the tour was a group of learners from The Mountain Cambridge School in Hartbeespoort.
The plant produces one 4-door 3-series BMW every 4 minutes, which means about 360 cars in 24 hours, with 90% of the 520 component parts arriving from the neighbouring steel plant about 3 hours before the build. The car’s body is assembled with minimum human intervention by 188 Kuka Robots, of which 8 do the measurements required to ensure the body alignment remains within an 0,2% tolerance. The body is designed in such a way that it can be configured as a right-hand or left-hand drive, so the only difference in the body assembly line is whether or not the car has a sunroof.
After the tour, the branch took the opportunity to shed some light on the control and instrumentation industry by talking to the students and answering their enthusiastic questions, filled with energy and expectation of what the future might hold for them.
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